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Aurea CX Messenger vs IBM MQ vs PubSub+ Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Message Queue (MQ) Software category, the mindshare of Aurea CX Messenger is 1.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM MQ is 25.9%, up from 21.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of PubSub+ Platform is 4.5%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Message Queue (MQ) Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM MQ25.9%
PubSub+ Platform4.5%
Aurea CX Messenger1.2%
Other68.4%
Message Queue (MQ) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Radhey Rajput - PeerSpot reviewer
Lightweight and efficient solution
It's very good and lightweight. But, it does not provide web service communication. But it is excellent for internal connections One valuable feature is the messaging broker. If there is a disruption, it restores the messages. And when the application is running, it delivers all the messages. The…
Md Al-Amin - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable and secure performance consistently enhances message transfer
IBM MQ is more reliable and secure than other software. There is a saying that for the last 30 years IBM MQ has never been hacked. It is more secure and reliable. Whenever the configuration is done, I do not have to touch it again. It works fine, it is stable, and its communication is to the point and accurate. All performance-related aspects are better. Performance-wise, it is scalable, and other features such as DR, DC, replication, and active passive mode are complex to configure, but it remains scalable. The pricing model for IBM MQ could be more flexible for clients.
BhanuChidigam - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs well, high availability, and helpful support
We use approximately four people for the maintenance of the solution. My advice to others is this solution has high throughput and is used for many stock exchanges. For business critical use cases, such as processing financial transactions at a quick speed, I would recommend this solution. I rate PubSub+ Event Broker an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"ESB: Provides all kind of possibilities to resolve business needs. A lot of ready to use services plus custom Java services. I used a lot of them all."
"SDM: User-friendly tool which allows for a seamless approach to performing hotfixes, if required."
"The solution offers excellent stability."
"The features that I have found most valuable are that it is very easy to develop. Most of it is graphical, but we also have the option to add any custom call that you need."
"The Messenger Broker is a really good feature."
"The solution is highly scalable, this is very important for us. It can handle a lot of messages."
"The most valuable feature is the stability. It's perfect in this way."
"It is easy to create a new queue, and the queue manager connecting to the remote queue works smoothly once the IP and port are included."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"I like the architecture it provides seamlessly for assured delivery."
"Technical support is quite helpful."
"It also has a backup queue concept and topics, features that I have not seen anywhere else. I like these features very much."
"The features of IBM MQ that have proven most effective for ensuring message delivery reliability are the stability of the system, the resilience and the product, which is definitely of top quality in this segment."
"Reliable messaging and throughput are the most valuable."
"In my assessment of Solace against other products — as I was responsible for evaluating various products and bringing the right tool into companies in the past — I worked with multiple platforms like RabbitMQ, Confluent, Kafka, and various other tools in the market. But I found the event mesh capability to be a very interesting as well as fulfilling capability, towards what we want to achieve from a digital-integration-strategy point of view... It's distributed, yet it is intelligently connected. It can also span and I can plug and play any number of brokers into the event mesh, so it's a great deal. That's a differentiator."
"As of now, the most valuable aspects are the topic-based subscription and the fanout exchange that we are using."
"This solution reduces the latency to access changes in real-time and the effort required to onboard a new subscriber. It also reduces the maintenance of each of those interfaces because now the publisher and subscribers are decoupled. Event Broker handles all the communication and engagement. We can just push one update, then we don't have to know who is consuming it and what's happening to that publication downstream. It's all done by the broker, which is a huge benefit of using Event Broker."
"Guaranteed Messaging allows for us to transport messages between on-prem and the cloud without any loss of data."
"We've built a lot of products into it and it's been quite easy to feed market data onto the systems and put entitlements and controls around that. That was a big win for us when we were consolidating our platforms down. Trying to have one event bus, one messaging bus, for the whole globe, and consolidate everything over time, has been key for us. We've been able to do that through one API, even if it's across the different languages."
"The topic hierarchy is pretty flexible. Once you have the subject defined just about anybody who knows Java can come onboard. The APIs are all there."
"One of the main reasons for using PubSub+ is that it is a proper event manager that can handle events in a reactive way."
"We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code."
 

Cons

"The solution needs to improve support for new, more recent protocols on the API."
"You should not hurry with upgrades without testing the whole product completely."
"Aurea CX Messenger could improve by making better use of the new APIs"
"It should include/add more services with the product as per market demand. It should include custom Java services developed by any organization or provide a platform where users/developers can share ideas/custom services, etc."
"The improvement is that it should be on the cloud and use web services."
"I don't know if the last version has the cloud option, but maybe that could be good. That could be something that is included."
"If they could have some front-end monitoring tool that could be easily available for the team to use, that could be great."
"I can't say pricing is good."
"In IBM MQ, the channel connection is an area where my company faces some limitations. At times, we hit limitations on the connection, meaning the connection is fully occupied."
"It's not always easy for applications to connect to IBM MQ, but I think it's fine in general."
"There are things within the actual product itself that can be improved, such as limitations on message length, size, etc. There is no standardized message length outside of IBM. Each of the implementations of the MQ series or support of that functionality varies between various suppliers, and because of that, it is very difficult to move from one to the other. We have IBM MQ, but we couldn't use it because the platform that was speaking to MQ didn't support the message length that was standard within IBM MQ. So, we had to use a different product to do exactly the same thing. So, perhaps, there could be more flexibility in the standards around the message queue. If we had been able to increase the message queue size within the IBM MQ implementation, we wouldn't have had to go over to another competing product because the system that was using MQ messaging required the ability to hold messages that were far larger than the IBM MQ standard. So, there could be a bit more flexibility in the structuring. It has as such nothing to do with the IBM implementation of MQ. It is just that the standard that is being put out onto the market doesn't actually stipulate those types of things."
"Better error handling, such as a default dead message queue for errors, would be beneficial."
"I'm not sure that current version has event-driven mechanism requests that people go for. I would like the latest version to come with both type of event mechanisms: an email server and a POP server. If that is not there, then that would be a great addition."
"IBM MQ's pricing is higher than its competitors'."
"I would like them to design topic and queue schemas, mapping them to the enterprise data structure."
"The ease of management could be approved. The GUI is very good, but to configure and manage these devices programmatically in the software version is not easy. For example, if I would like to spin up a new software broker, then I could in theory use the API, but it would require a considerable amount of development effort to do so. There should be a tool, or something that Solace supports, that we could use for this, e.g., a platform like Terraform where we could use infrastructure as code to configure our source appliances."
"One of the areas of improvement would be if we could tell the story a bit better about what an event mesh does or why an event mesh is foundational to a large enterprise that has a wide diversity of applications that are homegrown and a small number off the shelf."
"The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively."
"It could be cheaper. It could also have easier usage. It is a brilliant product, but it is quite complex to use."
"If you create one event in the past, you cannot resend it."
"The section on observability pertains to understanding the functioning of an event crash. Instead of focusing on how the crash occurs, attention is given to the observable aspects, such as a memory pipeline where one person pushes messages and another reads them. However, this pipeline often encounters issues, such as the reader being unavailable, causing the system to become stuck and preventing the messages from moving forward. This can lead to the pipeline being permanently stalled."
"The integrations could improve in PubSub+ Event Broker."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Much better than Oracle SOA Suite."
"You pay nothing for licensing, because the commercial model is a subscription. Other environments, such as QA and Development, are included in the subscription"
"The pricing is not so high."
"Most of our customers are quite happy with the solution but they have an issue with the cost. They want to move to cheaper solutions."
"The price is high."
"If one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the tool's price a seven. The product is expensive."
"You have to license per application installation and if you expand vertically or horizontally, you will be paying for more licenses. The licenses are approximately $10,000 to $15,000 a license, it can get expensive quite quickly."
"In terms of cost, IBM MQ is slightly on the higher side."
"IBM MQ appliance has pricing options, but they are costly."
"I think IBM needs to look at its pricing. The prices of IBM products should be simple. The old way of pricing should now be moving on to the cloud to be pay as you go, a plan-based kind of pricing."
"The pricing seems good according to the functionality that the solution provides."
"We have been really happy with the product licensing rates. It has been free for us, up to a 100,000 transactions per second, and all we have to do is pay for support. Making their product available and accessible to us has not been a problem at all."
"The price of PubSub+ Event Broker is reasonable for the capability it offers. However, when compared to others solutions on the market it is expensive."
"There are different tiers where you can choose what would work for you. As a customer, you need to know roughly how many messages a month you will use."
"Having a free version of the solution was a big, important part of our decision to go with it. This was the big driver for us to evaluate Solace. We started using it as the free version. When we felt comfortable with the free version, that is when we bought the enterprise version."
"It could be cheaper. Its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The licensing is dependent on the volume that is flowing. If you go for their support services, it will cost some more money, but I think it is worth it, especially if you are just starting your journey."
"We are looking for something that will add value and fit for purpose. Freeware is good if you want to try something quickly without putting in much money. However, as far as our decision is concerned, I don't think it helps. At the end of the day, if we are convinced that a capability is required, we will ask for the funding. Then, when the funding is available, we will go for an enterprise solution only."
"Having a free version is critical for our technology operations use case. This is primarily because our technology operations team is a cost center in our company. They are not profit drivers and having a free version for installation will probably meet our needs. Even for production, it'll support up to a 100,000 messages per second. I don't think in technology operations that we have that many events and alerts from our detection tools. Even if I have 20 or 30 event detection products out there, they're only going to publish the things which are critical or warnings. I don't think we'll ever reach a 100,000 messages per second."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Insurance Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Media Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
36%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
4%
Financial Services Firm
31%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise144
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is MQ software?
Hi As someone with 45+ years of experience in the Transaction and Message Processing world, I have seen many "MQ" sol...
What are the differences between Apache Kafka and IBM MQ?
Apache Kafka is open source and can be used for free. It has very good log management and has a way to store the data...
How does IBM MQ compare with VMware RabbitMQ?
IBM MQ has a great reputation behind it, and this solution is very robust with great stability. It is easy to use, si...
What needs improvement with PubSub+ Event Broker?
Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensi...
What is your primary use case for PubSub+ Event Broker?
My typical use case for the PubSub+ Platform is as an event-driven solution for communication between two components.
What advice do you have for others considering PubSub+ Event Broker?
I have experience working with Kafka, PubSub+ Platform, and IBM MQ, all three of them. We are customers, meaning my c...
 

Also Known As

CX Messenger Enterprise, Aurea Sonic ESB, Aurea Sonic, Aurea Sonic MQ
WebSphere MQ
PubSub+ Event Broker, PubSub+ Event Portal
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Heathrow, HomeServe, Paypal, Freedom Mortgage
Deutsche Bahn, Bon-Ton, WestJet, ARBURG, Northern Territory Government, Tata Steel Europe, Sharp Corporation
FxPro, TP ICAP, Barclays, Airtel, American Express, Cobalt, Legal & General, LSE Group, Akuna Capital, Azure Information Technology, Brand.net, Canadian Securities Exchange, Core Transport Technologies, Crédit Agricole, Fluent Trade Technologies, Harris Corporation, Korea Exchange, Live E!, Mercuria Energy, Myspace, NYSE Technologies, Pico, RBC Capital Markets, Standard Chartered Bank, Unibet 
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Apache, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in Message Queue (MQ) Software. Updated: August 2025.
868,229 professionals have used our research since 2012.